Charge Your Phone 10x Faster: Battery Breakthrough

The days of being chained to a wall waiting for your phone to recharge could soon be over, thanks to new technology demonstrated by Huawei.

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It's an uncomfortable, and all-too-familiar scenario: after a day out and about, you're forced to keep your dying phone plugged in for the rest of the night. Fortunately, a recent breakthrough in battery technology could give you hours of battery life in just five minutes. Phone maker Huawei demonstrated a new configuration for a lithium-ion battery that it says can be charged 10 times faster than current batteries.

In a video, the company took out a nearly empty 3000-mAh battery from a phone, charged it for five minutes and put it back in the handset. That five minutes brought the battery back to 48 percent of endurance.

Huawei has already demonstrated that it can bring fast-charging devices to market. The company made the Nexus 6P, which in our testing jumped from 0 to 32 percent after ten minutes of charging. But Huawei's not the only one investing in rapid charging methods.

Motorola's TurboPower charger is supposed to give you hours of power in minutes of charging. When I tested it with the Droid Maxx 2, I got from 6 to 19 percent of its large 3630-mAh battery in just 10 minutes. Plenty of other phones in the market support Qualcomm's Quick Charge 2.0, which purports to give a 3300-mAh battery up to 60 percent juice in 30 minutes of charging.

We ran in-depth tests to see which handset is the fastest-charging, and our current frontrunner is the Asus ZenFone 2. The Samsung Galaxy S6 came in second, while the iPhone 6 consistently brought up the rear.

If Huawei's tech does come to market, it could easily take the throne. For now, we'll have to wait and see, but it seems like the days of being chained to a wall waiting for your phone to power up could soon be over.